The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (14 page)

Almost all the allegations were peddled by a radical journalist and MP (and ocean-going creep) called Henry Labouchere, who was not only vehemently anti-Semitic but moved a horrible motion in Parliament that criminalised all homosexual activity. The allegations do not appear to have any foundation. Churchill’s lawyers easily dismissed the baseless suggestion that he had indulged in ‘
practices of the Oscar Wilde variety’ and he won very substantial damages.

Did he really ‘use’ young
Ralph Wigram, and recklessly blight his career? It is not quite clear that Wigram did commit suicide, and in any event the Foreign Office man leaked information to Churchill because he wanted to expose the horror of what was happening in Germany, and government complacency.

He did it out of a sense of duty—not because he was cozened by Churchill. After the funeral, Churchill threw a lunch party at Chartwell for the mourners; and showed great solicitude to his wife, Ava, with whom he remained in touch for many years afterwards.

Nor does Churchill need to reproach himself for any detail of his conduct towards Haldane and Brockie, his two would-be fellow-escapees from the Pretorian jail. It is absolutely clear from all the diaries and letters that when it came down to it, on the night, they just wimped out.

Churchill went into the latrine and jumped over the wall, and then waited for them for an hour and a half in the garden, risking detection. But they never came: he can’t be blamed for that! He later sent gold watches to all those who helped him escape, a present he could ill afford. Did he do it out of some sense of guilt? On the contrary; he did it out of characteristic impulsiveness and generosity.

Let us deal lastly with the general charge of selfishness: that he wasn’t much interested in other people, that he wasn’t much fun at parties—except when bragging about himself. Of course he was
self-centred, and narcissistic—a fact that he readily acknowledged. But that does not mean he had no interest in or care for other people.

Read his letters to Clementine,
worrying about such things as whether the baby is going to lick the paint off the Noah’s ark animals. Think of his kindness to his mother—who had actually cheated him of his £200,000 inheritance; how he puts his arms round her on the day of her wedding to George Cornwallis-West, and tells her that her own happiness is all that matters.

Note his endless generosity towards his younger brother Jack, who lives with Churchill in Downing Street in the war. All the evidence suggests that Churchill was warm hearted to the point of downright sentimentality. He showers kindness on his menagerie at Chartwell (not conclusive, of course: Hitler liked Blondi, his Alsatian; but Churchill’s love extended much farther over the animal kingdom).

He blubs at the drop of a hat. He weeps at the news that Londoners are queuing to buy birdseed to feed their canaries during the Blitz; he weeps when he tells an ecstatic House of Commons that he has been forced by fate to blow up the French navy; he weeps when he watches Alexander Korda’s
Lady Hamilton
, a film he sees seventeen times. He loved cheap music, and we have plenty of vignettes of Churchill bawling out his favourites; he was no party-pooper.

He was openly emotional in a class and society that was supposed to be all about the stiff upper lip. And—most unusually for a British politician—he never bore grudges. People responded to this warmth; and if he was exhausting to work for, his colleagues nonetheless gave him loyalty and unstinting devotion.

When he came back from New York in 1932, after nearly dying under the wheels of an oncoming car, he was presented with a Daimler. The Daimler had been organised by Brendan Bracken, and financed by a whip-round of 140 friends and admirers.

Can you think of any modern British politician with enough friends and admirers to get them a new Nissan Micra, let alone a Daimler? It would be fair to say that his wife did not always approve of his friends: F. E. Smith was a boozer; Beaverbrook was said to have been dodgy in his business dealings; and Brendan Bracken—who rather played up the (absurd) suggestion that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son—was positively bizarre.

Bracken lied about his age, even going back to school in order to fake it. He lied about his Irish origins, and claimed to be Australian. A fine man, you might think, to end up being Minister for Information. But Churchill stuck with them, and they with him.

Reading that account by Dewar-Gibb of Churchill in the trenches, I am struck by the favourable mention of Lord Fisher—the great naval chief who went so spectacularly wobbly over the Dardanelles in 1915, and whose inconstancy contributed significantly to the delay, and therefore to the disaster.

‘
Colonel Churchill amused us much by his frequent stories of Lord Fisher,’ says Captain Dewar-Gibb, ‘for whom he seemed to have the greatest admiration.’ That shows superb generosity of soul, when you consider that Fisher’s wacko behaviour had helped all but destroy Churchill’s political career.

On leave from the trenches for a couple of days, he then made a speech in the Commons urging the recall of Fisher to the Admiralty—a suggestion that most people thought was final proof that Churchill had lost the plot altogether. He didn’t have to defend Fisher—in fact Fisher had been spectacularly disloyal to him, telling Clementine (falsely, it seems) that the reason
Churchill was always hopping over to Paris was to see a girlfriend.

There was every reason, rationally, for him to chuck the old man overboard. But Churchill didn’t think like that: he liked Fisher, he admired him, and he wanted to express it.

He had what the Greeks called
megalopsychia
—greatness of soul. Churchill was not a practising Christian. He never believed in the more challenging metaphysics of the New Testament; and when some prelate benignly hailed him as a ‘pillar of the church’ he had the honesty instantly to demur. He was more of a ‘
flying buttress’, he said.

His ethic was really pre-Christian, even Homeric. His abiding interest was in glory and prestige—both for himself and for the ‘British Empire’. But he had a deep sense of what it was right and fitting for him to do—and remember that his self-narrator’s eye was beadily following and judging him all the time.

—

T
HAT IS WHY
I am here at this sodden graveyard in East London. The lady before and beneath me is—of course—Churchill’s nanny. ‘Erected to the memory of Elizabeth Ann Everest,’ says the inscription, ‘who died on 3rd July 1895 aged 62 years, by Winston Spencer Churchill and John Spencer Churchill’.

Compared to the other memorials, it is not a particularly gushing tribute. There is no mention of love, or angels singing her to rest; and indeed the two-foot cross is just about the smallest and plainest that I can see. The story of how it came to be here is in some ways an awful one, but also a physical testimonial to the fundamental goodness of Churchill’s nature.

As we have seen, Churchill’s mother Jennie was a remote and glamorous figure, swishing in panther-like in her skin-tight riding gear to kiss him goodnight; otherwise not much involved. It was Mrs Everest, a largish and middle-aged woman from the Medway towns, who gave Churchill the unstinting love he craved. Most Churchill biographies rightly contain a splendid picture of her looking a bit like a pudgy Queen Victoria: white lace cap and black dress, with so
much bustle and petticoat that she appears as pyramidical in structure as Everest itself.

‘
My nurse was my confidante,’ said Churchill. ‘Mrs Everest it was who looked after me and tended all my wants. It was to her I poured out my many troubles.’ He called her ‘Woom’ or ‘Woomany’, and we have many lovely letters from her to him: urging him to take heroin for his toothache, to watch out for the east wind, not to try to get on moving trains, to avoid the hot weather, and debt, and bad company.

On one famous occasion neither of his parents could be bothered to come to his Speech Day at Harrow; so Mrs Everest came, and Churchill walked around town with her, arm proudly in arm, while the other boys snickered. That showed moral courage; and more was to come.

When Churchill was seventeen and Jack was eleven it was decided that the nanny was no longer needed; and though there were plenty of posh English families that retained their superannuated nannies, Churchill’s mother made no provision for Mrs Everest. She was to be out on her ear.

Churchill was incensed. He protested, supposedly on behalf of his brother; and as a compromise work was found for her at the London home of his grandmother, the Duchess. But two years later that job, too, came to an end. Again Churchill was angry that she was being treated in this way—dismissed by a letter! He accused his mother of being ‘
cruel and mean’.

It was no good. Mrs Everest went to live in Crouch End, and Churchill helped to support her from his own relatively meagre income. She continued to write to him, and while he was at Sandhurst she sent him some encouragement. ‘
Take plenty of open air exercise and you will not require medicine . . . Be a good Gentleman, upright, honest, just, kind and altogether lovely. My sweet old darling, how I do love you, be good for my sake.’

By 1895 Mrs Everest’s health was failing, and on 2 July he received a telegram at Sandhurst, saying that her condition was ‘critical’. He arrived at Crouch End, to find her only concern was for him: he had got wet on the way there. ‘
The jacket had to be taken off and thoroughly dried before she was calm again.’

He found a doctor and a nurse, and then had to rush back to Aldershot for the morning parade—returning to North London as soon as the parade was over. She sank into a stupor and died at 2.15 a.m., with Churchill by her side.

It was Churchill who organised the funeral and the wreaths and the tombstone, and indeed it was Churchill who paid for them all, out of his own exiguous resources. He was only twenty.

It is hard to know exactly how much the world owes Winston Churchill’s nanny. But if anyone taught him to be good and kind and by and large truthful, it was surely her. She it was, I reckon, who helped him to that vast and generous moral sense.

Once, at the age of seven, he was walking with his nanny in the grounds of Blenheim. ‘
We saw a snake crawling about in the grass,’ he wrote to his father. ‘I wanted to kill it but Everest would not let me.’ Chapeau, Mrs Everest.

It may be that Churchill despaired when Everest died, and thought he would never again find a woman so rock-like and dependable. If so, he was wrong there. It is time to consider his brilliant decision to marry Clementine; and, indeed, the eternal puzzle of Winston Churchill’s relations with women in general.

CHAPTER 9

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE

S
o let us pause now outside the Temple of Artemis, and adopt the sibilant whisper of a TV naturalist. We have come at the height of August to the vast and rolling park of Blenheim Palace, a noted breeding-ground for the English aristocracy. A light summer shower is falling. It is mid-morning. Inside that graceful little Ionic-porticoed temple the time-honoured mating ritual is coming, in theory, to its climax.

Sitting on the bench at the back are Winston Churchill, thirty-three, President of the Board of Trade, and a lovely female with large dark eyes, called Clementine Hozier. Notice how carefully the male has chosen the location: the palace, to display the wealth and power of his family, and the genes he has to offer; the view of the lake, to inspire feelings of romance; a scrunchy gravel path on either side, to alert him to anyone who might be coming.

Any minute now he is going to pop the question. Clementine is surely aware of the significance of the temple: Artemis is the virgin goddess of hunting, and here the virgin has been brought to bay.

Let us tiptoe over the moss behind the building, and see whether we can hear what they are saying. Shhh.

Churchill appears to be talking . . . and talking. The female is still sitting with her eyes downcast. In fact, she is looking not at the animated face of the male, but at a beetle on the floor. She is watching the beetle as it moves slowly from one crack in the flagstone to the next—and she is wondering, frankly, whether Churchill is ever going to get to the point. Churchill has had her on his own, in the temple, for half an hour—and still he hasn’t summoned up the courage to blurt it out.

Any biologist studying the romantic life of Winston Churchill might conclude that he makes the courtship of the giant panda look positively rash and impetuous. He first met Clementine four years ago, and made a not wholly favourable impression. He met her more recently, and things went swimmingly—and now he has sent her letters that make it pretty clear what he has in mind for her. He has plotted it all out, as he plots out so much in his life.

Five days ago, on 7 August 1908, he wrote to invite her to Blenheim, and he dropped a hint that no one could miss. ‘
I want so much to show you that beautiful place and in its gardens we shall find lots of places to talk in, and lots of things to talk about.’ The next day he writes another letter, explaining which train she should catch, and refers to ‘
those strange mysterious eyes of yours whose secret I have been trying so hard to learn’.

He goes on to warn her, with tactical self-deprecation, that he has difficulties with girls, being ‘stupid and clumsy in that relation and naturally quite self-reliant and self-contained’. By that path, he admits, he has managed to ‘arrive at loneliness’ . . . HINT! HINT! Clementine is being clearly given to understand—by all the forms and conventions of Edwardian England, where
premarital sex was a no-no for respectable girls—that she is going to be made an offer.

Well, she has been here in Blenheim for three days, and nothing has happened. Churchill has not lunged; he has not pounced; he has not even coughed as they sat on the sofa, and suddenly draped an arm round her lovely shoulders. Poor thing, we feel: she must be starting to wonder whether she has failed some unspoken exam. Now is the morning when she has to leave, and Churchill has not even got out of bed. In fact (though she doesn’t know this) his cousin the Duke of Marlborough himself has had to go into Churchill’s room in order to rouse him, and tell him firmly that if he wants to propose to this girl, he had better get up and get a move on.